by Myrna Velasco April 24, 2016
Separate guidelines on competitive
selection process (CSP) for renewable energy (RE) projects are being thought
out, primarily taking into account the uniqueness and peculiarities of some
emerging technologies.
Energy Regulatory Commission (ERC)
Chairman Jose Vicente B. Salazar has indicated this to media as he took note of
the concerns raised by some industry players on the seeming inability of RE to
compete with other technologies, primarily with coal on the price aspect.
In the proposed contracting round for
RE, the ERC chief noted that they shall also weigh how RE investments can still
be encouraged – essentially with the calls of some sectors for the country to
finally veer away from the feed-in-tariff-laden project implementations.
“Should we encourage more REs or as
a third world country, do we now need to ascertain the cost implications of
these to our consumers,” he averred.
ERC Commissioner Josefina Patricia
M. Asirit, for her part, gave an initial glimpse of what are the specific parameters
they have been considering in the crafting of the CSP guidelines for RE
ventures.
“We should be studying what’s the
way forward for the installation targets – if it will be location specific or
auctioned off per technology,” she noted.
In terms of location, Asirit
emphasized that they are taking tough lessons from the Negros Occidental
dilemma of transmission-constrained solar plants.
She noted that they will evaluate
‘transmission capacity limits’ when they start writing the CSP code for RE
projects.
With the project completion race set
off by the Department of Energy (DOE), solar developers just went ahead with
their project developments without seriously ruminating on the line limitation
that could shackle their capacity’s wheeling into the grid.
Worse, it is not only capacity
curtailment that they could be suffering from – but they also have the public
as ‘collateral damage’ to power system strain when their generation would
suddenly go on-and-off – that in effect, such gridlock could trigger unwanted
blackouts in the Visayas grid.
Concerned stakeholders are already
realizing and acknowledging the fallacy and adverse implications of such
outcome of the ‘solar race.’
Nevertheless, both the government
policy-framers and the National Grid Corporation of the Philippines are still
having their hands tied up on the solution realm because of the ‘grid’s
resource lack’ on specific technology type that could sort out Negros’ need for
frequency regulation capacity that could help arrest blackout conditions.
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